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A portion of the computer's hard drive is set aside for a paging file or a scratch partition, and the combination of physical RAM and the paging file form the system's total memory. (For example, if a computer has 2 GB (1024 3 B) of RAM and a 1 GB page file, the operating system has 3 GB total memory available to it.)
Serviceability or maintainability is the simplicity and speed with which a system can be repaired or maintained; if the time to repair a failed system increases, then availability will decrease. Serviceability includes various methods of easily diagnosing the system when problems arise. Early detection of faults can decrease or avoid system ...
The operating system will place actively used data in RAM, which is much faster than hard disks. When the amount of RAM is not sufficient to run all the current programs, it can result in a situation where the computer spends more time moving data from RAM to disk and back than it does accomplishing tasks; this is known as thrashing.
RAM drives use normal system memory as if it were a partition on a physical hard drive rather than accessing the data bus normally used for secondary storage. Though RAM drives can often be supported directly in the operating system via special mechanisms in the OS kernel, it is generally simpler to access a RAM drive through a virtual device ...
random-access memory (RAM) A type of computer data storage that allows data items to be accessed (read or written) in almost the same amount of time irrespective of the physical location of data inside the memory. RAM contains multiplexing and demultiplexing circuitry to connect the data lines to the addressed storage for reading or writing the ...
Associated with speed, the more RAM there is in the system, the faster the computer can run, because it allows the RAM to run more information through to the computer's (CPU). Not only does adding more RAM to a computer help it run faster, it helps boots up a computer immensely faster compared to booting up a system with less RAM.
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This type is used for the main memory in most computers, since data is stored on the hard disk while the computer is off. Major types are: [7] [8] RAM (Random-access memory) – This has become a generic term for any semiconductor memory that can be written to, as well as read from, in contrast to ROM (below), which can only be